#all the names they used for god

[st-just]

It is centuries, now, since the angel began her work with humans, and being close to them has invoked her curiosity, if not her admiration. They are just so many stories patched together, so many forgotten days encased in bone and meat. One might unearth almost anything with enough searching. Being a muse is mostly this- sifting through the memories for something of merit, hauling it to the surface where it can shine. The endeavor has, at the best of times, an exotic appeal. Forgetting is a concept the angel knows only through observation. Every moment of her long existence echoes through her like the unfading peal of a bell, things she would forget every bit as loud as those she would remember.

-Killer of Kings, by Anjali Sachdeva

[literary-illuminati]

I'm not quite finished it yet, but All The Names They Used For God might be the only short story collection I can recall that really pulls off being thematically cohesive and hitting the same point in a dozen different stories with wildly dissimilar plots, settings, and characters.

[lilliankillthisman]

Critically acclaimed collection of short stories All The Names They Used For God, which people on here who I respect seem to have enjoyed, features John Milton drinking tea from "Darjeeling plantations". And the story is definitely intended to be in his time; it mentions his meeting with Galileo.

But while tea was starting to step into popularity by the very end of his lifetime, tea plantations in India only became a thing in the 19th century*.

Which is... interesting. The inclusion of the tea isn't hard to understand; it's a story about rebellion, about opposing unjust rule, and it's a fun little note to have Milton, impoverished and shunned for standing up to tyranny in England, enjoying tea grown by exploited labour in India in dire conditions under the yoke of the British Empire.

And it would still be a good note if it was dropped in intentionally, knowing it's an anachronism; I like trusting authors to know what they're doing. I'm just... not 100% on this one; I haven't been blown away so far.

*not suggesting no one in India drank or grew tea before then, but it's only an export crop under the British East India Company. Darjeeling tea only gets big mid-19th-century.

[egophiliac]

still ruminating over Lost In the Book With Spooky Skeletons Part 1, so here's a selection of some of my favorite little bits! (...some more loosely paraphrased than others) (I just feel like Idia has no room to criticize in general, okay)

anyway, I'm sure we're just going to have a fun time celebrating Halloween and nothing bad is going to happen whatsoever! :)

[stil-lindigo]

the calamity.

a comic about being seen.

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creative notes:

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all my other comics

store

[words-writ-in-starlight]

listen I expected literally Nothing from the D&D movie okay, like I can't make it clear enough that I expected the most soulless money grab with a good cgi budget imaginable, I went in having already gone through every stage of grief and landed on acceptance and LISTEN

I fucking CRIED during this dumb RPG movie. it wasn't just "not terrible" it was objectively good with a clever plot and compelling characters and sincere emotional beats. this movie loves D&D so fucking much and it NAILS the "a bunch of goobers try to be cool and accidentally discover The Power Of Friendship And Also Great Violence" classic D&D party vibe. their barbarian's last name is fucking Kilgore and my entire family cried in the theater.

I hope they make twelve of these motherfuckers.

[poorly-drawn-mdzs]

Ghouls night out

[First] Prev <–-> Next

[xxplastic-cubexx]

[right to left]

finally finished This Wip from Ever ago and so now i ask you ever look into another dudes eyes and suddenly want to do whatever he wants

[bet-on-me-13]

Why are there so many gods here?

SO! One day, the Eternal Trio decided to Check if they had ant past lives using Magic.

They already knew that Tucker was the Reincarnation of some Pharoah, so maybe they were also some historical figures in a last life.

It does not go as expected.

Danny finds out that he was the Ancient of Space, and the reason Clockwork was so invested in keeping him from being erased from Time is because he's his Brother apparently.

Sam finds out that she was the Embodiment of The Green, and Undergrowths attempt at Adopting her was some scheme to become the Parent of his used-to-be Queen while she was in Mortal Form, therefore overthrowing her.

Tucker finds out that Duulaman was just one in a long line of the Reincarnations of the Sun God Ra, and that he had been quite a few more historical figures in the Past.

They were surprised to figure this out, but then they got curious.

They tested the Spell out on Jazz, and found that she used to be an Amazonian Goddess, alongside Pandora.

They test it on Dash, and find that he used to be Hermes, God of Travel and Speed.

Ellie was an Embodiment of something called the Speed Force, who was also a child of Space before their rebirth, apparently.

They slowly realize that almost every person of note in Amity Park is the Reincarnation of some kind of God or Spirit. And none of them seem to realize that.

Why are there so many reborn Gods in this town?

...

Constantine is actually asking himself the EXACT same question at that very moment, after a botched teleportation spell landed him in Amity Park.

[yeoldenews]

While we’re on the subject of names, is there an explanation for how traditional nicknames came about that are seemingly unrelated to, or have little in common with, the original name?

ie- John/Jack, Richard/Dick, Henry/Harry/Hank, Charles/Chuck, Margaret/Peggy/Daisy, Sarah/Sally, Mary/Molly, Anne/Nan, etc

I am actually over a week into researching a huge follow-up post (probably more than one if I’m being honest) about the history of nickname usage, so I will be going into this in much, much more detail at a hopefully not-so-later date - if I have not lost my mind. (Two days ago I spent three hours chasing down a source lead that turned out to be a typographical error from 1727 that was then quoted in source after source for the next 150 years.)

As a preview though, here’s some info about the names you mentioned:

The origins of a good portion of common English nicknames come down to the simple fact that people really, really like rhyming things. Will 🠞Bill, Rob🠞Bob, Rick🠞Dick, Meg🠞Peg.

It may seem like a weird reason, but how many of you have known an Anna/Hannah-Banana? I exclusively refer to my Mom’s cat as Toes even though her name is Moe (Moesie-Toesies 🠞 Toesies 🠞 Toes).

Jack likely evolved from the use of the Middle English diminutive suffix “-chen” - pronounced (and often spelled) “-kyn” or “kin”. The use of -chen as a diminutive suffix still endures in modern German - as in “liebchen” = sweetheart (lieb “love” + -chen).

John (Jan) 🠞 Jankin 🠞 Jackin 🠞 Jack.

Hank was also originally a nickname for John from the same source. I and J were not distinct letters in English until the 17th Century. “Iankin” would have been nearly indistinguishable in pronunciation from “Hankin” due to H-dropping. It’s believed to have switched over to being a nickname for Henry in early Colonial America due to the English being exposed to the Dutch nickname for Henrik - “Henk”.

Harry is thought to be a remnant of how Henry was pronounced up until the early modern era. The name was introduced to England during the Norman conquest as the French Henri (On-REE). The already muted nasal n was dropped in the English pronunciation. With a lack of standardized spelling, the two names were used interchangeably in records throughout the middle ages. So all the early English King Henrys would have written their name Henry and pronounced it Harry.

Sally and Molly likely developed simply because little kids can’t say R’s or L’s. Mary 🠞 Mawy 🠞 Molly. Sary 🠞 Sawy 🠞 Sally.

Daisy became a nickname for Margaret because in French garden daisies are called marguerites.

Nan for Anne is an example of a very cool linguistic process called rebracketing, where two words that are often said/written together transfer letters/morphemes over time. The English use of “an” instead of “a” before words beginning with vowels is a common cause of rebracketing. For example: the Middle English “an eute” became “a newt”, and “a napron” became “an apron”. In the case of nicknames the use of the archaic possessive “mine” is often the culprit. “Mine Anne” over time became “My Nan” as “mine” fell out of use. Ned and Nell have the same origin.

Oddly enough the word “nickname” is itself a result of rebracketing, from the Middle English “an eke (meaning additional) name”.

I realized earlier this week that my cat (Toe’s sister) also has a rebracketing nickname. Her name is Mina, but I call her Nom Nom - formed by me being very annoying and saying her name a bunch of time in a row - miNAMiNAMiNAM.

Chuck is a very modern (20th century) nickname which I’ll have to get back to you on as I started my research in the 16th century and am only up to the 1810s so far lol.

[ariadne-mouse]

In rewatching the end of ep 110 I noticed the detail that when Veth is complaining about her son and husband, Caduceus says "that's twenty words, you've run out of message for complaining about your kid" which is funny not just because it should be 25 but the notion that Veth has been complaining about Luc's rebellious adventure SO much that they (or even just Caduceus) have attempted to create word limit rules around the topic

[moghedien]

Minthara says “in Her name” when you first meet her and she’s following the Absolute but when you recruit her and she expresses that she no longer follows any god, but she still has an intact paladin oath, and she says “in your name” occasionally because she’s no longer Lolth’s paladin or the Absolute’s paladin, she’s your paladin

[literary-illuminati]

Book Review 19 – All The Names They Used For God by Anjali Sachdeva

This is the second short story collection I’ve read this year, and of the two the only one that was really trying to be a coherent work in its own right and not just a grab bag of smaller pieces. I actually picked it up entirely off of a tumblr post, of all things – there was an excerpt from the story Killer of Kings that really got stuck in my head, and having read it I just needed to see the context and the rest of the work it was from. So, score one for viral word of mouth advertising I guess.

Killer of Kings – about the writing from Paradise Lost, from the perspective of Milton’s politically unreliable angelic muse – is absolutely the best story in the book, but there weren’t really any that struck me as bad. The overall tone is kind of dreaamlike – mythological, or in many cases the kind of story you’d expect to hear on a weird fiction podcast (if a very literary one). High on the uncanny and numinous, on weird situations and the touch of something transcendent, and just on people being put in situations. Low on high action, or really tension or plot at all – the narration usually feels like it’s at a bit of a remove, or if not then like one is observing the inevitable machinery of fate more than anything to really get excited about and caught up in. Dreams or fables, or something in between.

The writing is good enough to generally make the remove work, I think. Beautiful imagery in a lot of places, and very distinct (if occasionally pretty broad) voices for the points of view of all the different stories. Call prose lyrical is essentially just a buzzword at this point, but I think these mostly qualify.

There are nine stories in the book, and aside from the aforementioned fairy tale about regicide and mutinous angels, I’m afraid that I remember absolutely none of their titles. Or, no, that is a lie – the story about a pair of Nigerian girls abducted as brides by Boko Haram who escape after learning how to magically compel and dominate their husbands shares All The Names They Used For God with the whole collection, so I do remember that one. The other stories that really stuck in my head were of an albino homesteader in the Ozarks abandoning the farmhouse to explore and lose herself in the labyrinthine cave system she discovers, the modern day sailor in a dying fishing village becoming enraptured with the mermaid he glimpses as the ship he works gluts itself on the bounty of fishes she has called to feed the shark she’s become fascinated by herself, and the near-future story of identical septuplets created by their geneticist parents who are each struck by accident or disease as they go through adolescence and increasingly haunt their surviving, doomed siblings. (They’re all like that).

So clearly the plots and settings vary pretty wildly, but I do mean it when I say that the book was the most cohesive set of short stories on an artistic or thematic level I’ve read in quite a long time. Every story in the book (I’m pretty sure, at least) has a real sense of some vast and unseen mechanism of the universe brushing up against the mundane world, some intrusion of something grand and overwhelming and uncanny into the protagonist’s life. (It’s the title, after all – ‘God’ in a broad, rather pentheistic sense, but still, the glorious and uncaring clockwork behind the curtain.) And the culmination of each story is the protagonist (not always the point of view, but the character actually driving the plot) in one sense or another succumbing to the unknown, abandoning what they have and take a leap of faith into some transcendent self-destruction.

All to say the collection really works as a whole more than the individual stories do on their own. Which is probably entirely normal for short story collections that aren’t pulled together based on being based on the same property or written by the same author without much curation otherwise, but I really don’t read many of those that are also actually good.

[stealingyourbones]

Out of all of the people The Ghost King Phantom expected to relate to, it definitely wasn’t the scrawny red headed photographer of the Daily Planet. Jimmy Olsen has gotten so many temporary superpowers over his time being Superman’s friend. Hell, he once gained a 4th dimensional being’s reality warping abilities when he was given said dimensional being’s powers during a fight. Sure there’s a dozen or so heroes with the same amount of powers he has, but none as suddenly granted to them as a all powerful god that can relate to a teenager.

[egophiliac]

buckle up lads we're going BACK INTO THE BOOK

[umblrspectrum]

Can we get more of the murder drone x rain world au?

ok